FORT MARION AND BEYOND: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865-1900

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865 - 1900, a major survey of Plains pictographic art, on view from January 25-March 2 to coincide with Master Drawings New York.

This exhibition features the most important group of Plains Ledger Drawings created by Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota warrior artists since the 1996 exhibition organized by the Drawing Center, New York, and The American Federation of Arts, Plains Indian Drawings, 1865-1935: Pages from a Visual History, which in 1997 traveled to the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; and Frick Art Museum, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Fort Marion and Beyond will showcase over 100 works on paper that collectively demonstrate the preeminent importance of Plains pictographic art to the documentation, preservation and dissemination of the rich and diverse cultural heritage of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, and their essential but underrecognized contributions to the art history of the United States.

Over 75% of the drawings in this exhibition have never been shown in North America before. 

At the core of the exhibition are works by two artists: Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart), of the Cheyenne Nation, and Ohettoint, of the Kiowa Tribe, who were among 72 Indigenous warriors imprisoned without trial at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida for their alleged connection to the Red River War, a U.S. military campaign aimed at the forced displacement and migration of Southern Plains tribes onto reservations. During their incarceration (May 1875 - April 1878), fort commander Captain Richard Henry Pratt attempted to assimilate the nomadic warriors into white Protestant culture: altering their physical appearance (cutting their hair, dressing them in uniforms); educating them in subjects such as English and arithmetic (Harriet Beecher Stowe was a teacher); and providing them with sketchbooks and art supplies for drawing. As Pratt encouraged the prisoners to sell their drawings and retain all the income from the sales, many sold their work to an interested middle class. Other drawings were gifted to high-ranking politicians in an attempt to promote Pratt’s assimilation policies. 

In the face of the deliberate erasure of Native American cultures, the drawings offered an avenue for resistance and a means of documenting a threatened way of life and bringing it to the attention of the colonizers. The artworks created at Fort Marion are rooted in a long-standing Plains pictographic tradition of recording both personal and communal histories, as well as expressing the power and prestige of particular warriors. The Indigenous peoples painted on rock surface, hide, and later on muslin and paper, a medium that was introduced to them when Euro-Americans began moving into the Great Plains region in the 1830s. The Native Americans acquired ledger books, along with tools like pens and colored pencils, through trade or by taking them from dead soldiers on the battlefield, and then, in a palimpsestic gesture, covered previous owners’ inventory records with their own colorful figurations.